I feel special. I’ve never gotten an Easter basket before (parents focus on the meaning of Easter instead of bunnies and Hallmarky stuff) but when we came home from church, there was an Easter basket on the porch with my name on it. And not only was it overflowing with candy and toys, but there were eggs filled with $10 bills, baking supplies, and two bottles of my favorite—way too expensive to buy— Bedhead shampoo and conditioner. My PA/nurse sure knows how to put a basket together!
I was just thinking yesterday how I don’t know how to keep my relationships w/ PA (personal attendants) strictly professional and how sometimes that really screws me over. “Flexibility” essentially means a give and take relationship. For me this has meant that this particular PA has come out all the way to my house just to work for 1 hour or that I am willing to give up some afterschool activities so she can go home early because her husband has just come home from Iraq. Give and take means sometimes sacrificing what you want and I know there are a lot of very smart people who never have to do this because they keep strictly professional relationships for people who work with them. However, I just can’t do it (and am not sure I want to).
Having friendships with your PA also means you’re both more invested in things so feelings naturally DO get hurt. When one of my PAs took another job last year, I was crushed. She was equally hurt when we went to Memphis together this January and I didn’t spend much time with her (I was there to visit friends and didn’t make this clear). Things get sticky and complicated and sometimes ugly. I often feel like I’ve been thrown into this employer/manager position without any training and I admire people who are able to smoothly manage 5-7 PAs at one time. Keeping up with 2 is hard in itself (especially since I’m not “out” to them).
However, it’s times like these—getting an Easter Basket, going to Chuckie Cheese for a kid’s party, or combined family events— that make me appreciate the friendships I have with my PAs and all that they do for me. I sincerely love them.
Anyways, just had to tell someone. : ) Happy Easter to those that celebrate.
^_^
8 Comments
March 23, 2008 at 6:52 pm
A surprise Easter Basket - that’s the most adorable thing I have ever heard!
March 23, 2008 at 8:52 pm
I notice your dedication to equality when I see simple things like this, things I know you didn’t conciosuly think about and edit when you wrote them, but that they just came out because this is who you are: “they keep strictly professional relationships for people who work with them”… you didn’t say people who work for them as most people would, you said people who work with them. Wow. That really strikes me.
March 23, 2008 at 9:01 pm
dylan, after the surprise basket, you made my day.
March 24, 2008 at 8:14 am
Awesome!
Was just thinking about you this morning. Good thing I checked in. Have I got some stories to tell you about yesterday and some connections I made in my life, but I’ll have to do it later. Practicing calls! Maybe I’ll just write an entire damn post about it . . . lol
March 24, 2008 at 10:42 pm
Well, i’m an egalitarian to the extreme (even to what many would call an absurd extreme), but i still feel really passionately that PAs should work for disabled people, not “with” them…
I think it is possible to be friends with PAs (of my PA-using friends, one is completely into being friends with her PAs, 2 are at the opposite point of treating them completely as employees, and the rest are somewhere in between), but only if the nature of the relationship is clear from the start, i.e. that the PA does what the disabled person tells hir to do when in that role, no questions or exceptions (unless, i suppose, it’s something that would actually seriously endanger hir own safety (the PA’s that is - the disabled person’s safety is emphatically hir own business, and not the PA’s)), and the fruendship, if one develops, is separate and additional to that.
I am aware that there’s probably a contradiction between how i feel about PAs and my overarching anarchist and anti-capitalist beliefs that basically say the whole idea of an employer/employee relationship is fundamentally oppressive and ethically illegitimate. I really don’t know what PA support would look like in a post-capitalist, post-wage-labour society, tho…
I am quite glad that i don’t need PAs, as i really wouldn’t like to be in the position of an employer or manager. I prefer to be submissive rather than dominant in ALL my relationships.
(I am going to be a PA for a fellow crip activist for a week next week, because his PA is on holiday and i need the money, so he offered me the week’s work as a mutual-aid thing. It’s going tobe an… interesting experience, as i’ll see how it feels like to have both the friend/comrade and employee roles simultaneously… will probably produce some blog posts out of it…)
March 26, 2008 at 10:33 pm
shiva, i can’t wait to hear about your experiences as a PA! one thing i love about our community is how we fit like a puzzle (puzzle probably sounds corny….) still there is nothing more liberating than interdependence where instead of a nondisabled person “helping” a disabled person, a blind guy is opening a door for the kid in the chair while the chair user is reading a menu for a person w/ a learning disability who is terping for a deaf/hh person…
that’s my version of heaven : )
i hear you on work for v. work with. it’s so complicated, especially since the “work w/ the crip” has meant really scary service model/medical model shit before. but yet the “work for” has so many class ties to it i think, especially since back in the day it was only rich people who had PAs…
and my personal experience makes that even more complicated as i have liscensed nurses instead of certified PAs so naturally they have more of a tendency to take on the medical aspect of disability and want to be the expert (and my insurance provides this service because of that expertise…) so yes confusing..
i don’t think i’ve really said anything lol but i really appreciate your comment, it’s made me think a lot over the last few days
March 27, 2008 at 11:30 am
Your friends rock!
Re: complicated relationships with PAs, have you ever had a relationship that wasn’t complicated?
Can you tell me how?
March 30, 2008 at 11:42 pm
Belated happy Easter, CC!
Leave a Reply